My colleague Lee Sigelman, one of the co-founders of this blog, died a year ago today. On the sidebar at right, as regular readers have probably noticed, are the various posts that commemorated him in the weeks after his death, and there have probably been a few more since then. There were also public events, most recently in October when our department named our seminar room in his honor.
In looking around for something to talk about at the naming ceremony, I came across some blog entries that Lee started to write but never finished. These were just hanging out, invisible without a little poking around, in the back-end software that runs the blog. It was fun to see Lee’s notions for posts, sometimes just a link and sometimes a few thoughts.
I also came across a half-finished one from June 2009 that is worth putting out there. Lee’s work as a journal editor, most notably for the _American Political Science Review_, gave him an uncommonly informed perspective on running journals. He wrote several posts about improving scholarly journals: “part 1”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/02/post_164.html, “part 2”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/02/improving_scholarly_journals_p.html, “part 2a”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/03/post_174.html, and “part 2b”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/04/improving_scholarly_journals_p_2.html. This unfinished post was to be part 3.
I cut and pasted his notes below. I will refrain from embroidering them or interpreting them or adding my own thoughts. I think these stand well enough on their own.
* Encourage reviewers to focus on critical issues and big ideas, and limit the length of reviews.
* Editors should be cautious in requesting revisions, and multiple revisions should be deeply discouraged.
* Review turnaround time needs to be short.
* Emphasize translational implications, if any, of results. Impact of journal articles will be improved if they provide a direct line of reasoning for how findings might translate into useful information for real-world behaviors or technologies.
Lee, we miss you.